Creative Process Archives

S.A.F.T. – Release Trailer (making of)

I did a quick editing job yesterday for Oliver’s new band, a teaser trailer for a project called S.A.F.T.

It’s the German word for “juice”, but it’s also a word made up of the initials of the three band members. Their album is already available, but for an upcoming official release party, the band wanted a quick and snappy introduction to their project, no longer than perhaps two minutes.

After finishing up some of my other projects, I promised Oliver that I’d take a look at it – and here’s the result. The band were all happy, and I sincerely hope they’ll have a good launch gig in my hometown of Bremen, Germany to celebrate their hard work of putting this project together. Rock on, guys!

I had free creative reign over the end result, and I thought I’d share my process on this project with you: the assets I had available, the ideas I brought to the table, and how I turned them into the video you see above. Come to think of it, I never take enough notes when it comes to creative projects, documenting The Creative Process if you will, so let’s change this today.

Here’s how I made that S.A.F.T. Release Trailer.

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My Audiobook Narration Setup for Audible, Amazon and iTunes

When I decided to narrate my book BROKEN BOWELS for publication through ACX, I had several ideas for the workflow.

In essence, and after many tests as to what would yield the best quality, I did the following:

  • record to my Mac using Quicktime
  • transcode the resulting native AIFC files into Apple Lossless M4A using Finder
  • edit in Adobe Premiere
  • bulk-transcode to MP3 files with ACX specifications using Adobe Media Encoder

I’ve tried various other workflows, but the above seems to work great for me.

Let me share my reasoning and experiment with you here.

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My new HP Z600 Workstation

photo-sep-24-16-22-52I’m as excited as a kid in a candy store – because last Monday my new (old) HP Z600 Workstation has arrived! Built and sold to the government in the summer of 2009 for roughly $5000 (give or take a grand), it came to me via an eBay auction for $171 plus postage some seven years later.

Equipped with two Intel Xeon 5560 processors, no hard drive, 4GB of RAM and only a COA sticker for Windows Vista, I had a little bit of work to do to get it all going:

  • get a USB keyboard
  • get a power cord
  • get a graphics card
  • perhaps grab some more RAM
  • find a network cable
  • download a copy of Windows Vista (not easy to find in 2016)

I wanted to use this machine for 3D rendering in both Carrara and DAZ Studio, so for the latter I decided to buy an NVIDIA GTX 970 graphics card. I had to do a few internal modifications to the machine to make it work – but work it does, and it was a lot of fun to get this rig going.

Without further ado, here’s my Z600 story.

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